Viewing a notebook on GitHub is only meant as a preview for developers. The Jupyter Community offers a more full-featured viewing tool nbviewer for sharing ‘static’ notebooks with non-developers.
Example from same source ‘static’ notebook: Plotly plots work via nbviewer pointed at the same notebook here that doesn’t render the plots at GitHub’s preview.)
And the Jupyter Community also offers ways to run a lot of notebooks just by clicking links you can have in GitHub READMEs. If you don’t need a lot of computational power, you can use MyBinder with a full ipykernel or JupyterLite that uses the pyodide kernel that is having less and less limits as it is developed. I know I have pointed you to examples of this for Voici and Voila in the past here.
You can look for the ‘launch binder’ badge on GitHub repos and click on them to see it run all sorts of content from a link at GitHub, such as here.
Next to the ‘launch binder’ badge there is an example of a ‘launch lite’ badge that ends up offering much the same but there isn’t a server running the code somewhere. Instead it is running inside your browser. You just get files like connecting to a normal static website but the active computation for the involved kernel in the Jupyter interface is done in your browser.
(Actually, that is old JupyterLite version; the newest version has significant improvements discussed here
I’m not sure what you mean by this section - Visual Studio Code running on GitHub. You just said you wanted to run code separate from the application environment and then you bring up an application environment running from a link?
Visual Studio Code is a Microsoft Product. Microsoft also owns GitHub that they are willing to support it running from links at GitHub to get you into their ecosystem as a paying customer.
And the picture you show is related to Google Colab and not GitHub. Google Colab is another offering to get you as a paying customer.